Russian establishment DOES hate western civilization, that is not "narrative" that is fact told by them in live tv to your face FOR LAST 70 YEARS. That is not "narrative".

Western style of life is not only EU but also USA. I do not know how people can even doubt this lol.

If they wanted western life in russia, then establishment will make changes to have it there, no ? Russia is NOT democracy, it is tyranny, autocracy. Again it is not narrative it is what they do there lol

clearly yandex translator is not good as gogole translator . ;)

Yeah yeah they hate it so much they send their children to live in Europe and buy properties there.

Hating the west is only an ideology given to plebs

They hate west because by western standards they will be in jail for all LOOTING of russias natural resources and killing and abusing their own citizens. West is punishing people who do bad things. Russian oligarchy kids did nothing wrong, presumably.

contrary to west, in russia you get beaten by police because your children in west posted something on Xtwitter...

Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, yuri Shchekochikhin, Vasily Melnikov , Vladislav Avayev , Sergey Protosenya, Yevgeniy Palant, Yuri Voronov, Ravil Maganov, Vladimir Sungorkin, Anatoly Gerashchenko, Vadim Boyko, Vladimir Makei, Grigory Kochenov, Vladimir Bidenov + Pavel Antov, and thousands of others.

most spectacular was - Pyotr Kucherenko where two men holded him and third put shopping bag on his head, and noone saw nothing in whole plane... except three photos were taking of incident...

I don't buy this argument, it's the pinnacle of selection bias.

`any != all` after all.

Your argument is essentially; because some Russian people send some of their children to be educated or buy some property in the west (as a portfolio of how many?) that the argument that the state of Russia dislikes the EU holds no water.

To me, it's hardly evidence of anything, just like how some people in the UK fetishise Russia- yet the UK government is actively hostile and condemns without hesitation- Russias actions towards Ukraine.

My argument is not just about "some people", people who are pretty high up in the hierarchy. How about russian ex-president?

The "hate west" narrative is pushed because it makes sense during the war. If Putin decides now praising the west will let him keep the power the propaganda machine will do a 180 turn

it is autocracy, not democracy.

so they HATE west no matter what they say, so you are correct in that.

but you are making wrong conclusion,

machine is not bad thing BUT they are good people.

They ARE bad actors no matter if they use propaganda machine that way or any other way or not use at all. they are bad actors period. propaganda machine is separate thing.

Well, it's been for quite a while now. Acts of micro- (or mini-) aggression like fires, explosives in commercial shipping services, broken sea cables just became daily news.

The only positive aspect of this is after the root cause is found, the grid will become more resilient in the long term (but these kinds of changes typically take long time).

Again, how would these actions do anything but weaken Russia's position given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines? Wouldn't ukraine benefit the most from the perception that Russia is at war with the EU?

Spain helped ukraine with planning of this - https://apnews.com/article/russia-moskalik-car-bomb-322ab66d...

so blackout is attack from russia. so stop spreading lies of terrorist russian state.

Outside of discussing whether Russia is behind this or not, the broader Russian strategy seems aimed at undermining trust in European governments. [1]

The goal would be to create enough pressure from people - frustrated by problems like power cuts — so that governments must withdraw their support for Ukraine.

Any "WW III" fearmongering is similar : intimidate everyone into withdrawing support.

Many European countries have created emergency guides to help citizens preparing for crisis like this one. [2] This, I guess, has the underlying goal of maintaining trust in European governments.

[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-increasing-hybrid-att...

[2] : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-commission-urges-sto...

> given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines?

... Wait, how are you defining that? Much of the EU is about as close as it is possible to be to being at war with Russia without actually sending in troops.

For the record, I don't think that this particular event is a Russian act of sabotage.

But Russia is an aggressive authoritarian state that was already caught for (smaller) acts of sabotage in EU, some of them quite dangerous. Why they are doing this? Who knows, war in Ukraine was not rational too. Perhaps some people want to be evil just for the sake of being evil.

As a Russian emigrant, I long stopped trying to rationalize Kremlin decisions. Why authoritarians are authoritarians? Who knows. Mad with power or something.

The strategy is not even a secret. Russia sees itself as a major influence of the Europe.

You cannot control stable governments, so you destabilise them with various tools for prolonged periods of time and then you end up with a country which is much easier to influence.

How could this weaken Russia's position without a smoking gun pointing at them?

Same with the undersea cables.

The EU is the main provider of financial support to Ukraine, the country which Russia is currently attempting to invade, along with one of the major provider of weapons and training.

Europe is helping Ukraine it its defense against Russia. Russia has sabotaged a lot of things in multiple EU countries, including Spain. It's not far fetched to imagine Russia being the root cause of this, or being implicated in some way. Even if they are not, they 100% are watching this closely and learn how they can disrupt power throughout Europe.

How would this do anything but weaken the Russian position? The EU is clearly otherwise willing to watch Ukraine fall.

> The EU is clearly otherwise willing to watch Ukraine fall.

All the money, humanitarian aid, weapons, intelligence, training and geopolitical backing beg to differ.

Did Russia say they did it? No.

So you can weaken your opponent without getting the backlash.

I'm not saying Russia did it, just that they could be the cause of this. Weakening Europe is in their interest, and they already have blatantly done smaller scale sabotage. It wouldn't weaken their position, as you said, Europe is not really interested in taking Russia seriously atm. Sabotages, killings, politician corruption and public disinformation have been common tactics for them for a decade now. Now that Russia's #1 enemy is under their control, I'm not sure they are afraid to take on Europe more directly.

Reading this thread from Russia feels surreal.

Why is that? We're not saying it's definitely Russia, but exploring the possibility they could be behind this.

After the multiple sabotages, killings, corruption, as well as the invasion of a neighbor country, we have some reasons to think Russia is a bad state actor.

yes, invasion, occupation, colonization, genocide, massacre of civilians, killing of women and children, killing of doctors and nurses, killing of journalists, killing of UN personnel, totally a barbaric country, a bad state actor,

We feel similar when watching this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0unhxkWkiKY

Good place as any to ask: do you need a VPN to access the “Western” internet? Is the block on the Russian side, or are Western websites blocking Russian IPs?

The block is on the Russian side (in most cases), but not all Western sites are blocked (Hacker News is working). Most of Russians know how to use VPNs, though it is extremely inconvenient.

No in most cases. Meta products are banned, twitter, discord and youtube (this one mostly works in reality), but pretty much everything else is unaffected.

Some Western side companies banned Russia by IP's like Intel, but in general, my list of websites to tunnel through a VPN is rather short, like a dozen and mostly to unblock youtube as meta and twitter are cancer anyway.

Why?

not all people in west are that ignorant, atleast half of european public wants putin gone.

(other half is just living life not really caring about putin.)

I understand, but unfortunately, I don’t see any claims that are false.

Some more-unhinged ultranationalist elements of Russian societies loathe Western culture and what they see as 'decadent' Western values on their culture. This is not new. Xenophobia and hate of the Other has a long and sordid history in Russia.

Moreover, they are unable to just live-and-let-live and actively go out of their way to make other peoples lives miserable. This is due to pervasive zero-sum thinking in Russian strategic thinking. They are fixated on the idea that in order for Russia to 'win', others must suffer and lose.

Spain underinvests in its military. Russian mafias also control much of the costas.

I would surmise that the Russians think that Spain and Portugal are cowed, and want to keep them intimidated and prevent them from increasing their aid to Ukraine.

That sounds very reasonable.

Russia is an imperialist, terrorist state and wants to see all of Europe in its "sphere of influence"

They have already assassinated People in Spain last year

https://www.politico.eu/article/maxim-kuzminov-russia-ukrain...

I often have the same thoughts as you because, based on what I’ve seen, their actions aren’t strictly rational. For example, the damage to undersea cables will just be repaired, and it only end up angering everyone. Sometimes they also start local fires. I don’t really understand it either.

I do not really think that this needed to be a russians work tho. Spain and Portugal are really kinda far and it would be massively idiotic move even for them.

Some people close to power in Russia (Dugin) actually seem to believe Russia natural range is from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."

https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p126_10.x...

Dugin's views and influence is greatly exaggerated in Western media.

>renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."

This is a direct lie. Putin has never said this.

And one of the greatest lies that is being spread about Putin that he intends to conquer Europe and recreate Russian Empire.